Our research goals are to design, program, and evaluate the effectiveness of early career teachers’ interactions with a 3D virtual classroom occupied by 3D interactive virtual students simulating disruptive children, as a training practice opportunity for novice teachers on how to manage a disrupted classroom before the novice start teaching. The traning is tailored to simulate classroom from poor neighborhoods, one helps to learn by interacting with 1st-2nd grade virtual students, and another helps with 6th-7th grade students.

Technical challenges are to design and implement a 3D virtual environment in which:

30 semi-realistic diverse 3D children avatars,

situated in two 3D virtual classrooms (1st and 6th grade),

disrupt peer students by misbehaving (e.g. off task, aggressive),

acting out realistic facial expressions and gestures,

according to vignettes providing realistic scenarios of students’ behavior sequences;

and in which:

novice teachers are asked to chose scenarios (e.g. give the student more time for the assigned task),

to learn from their mistake if their choice worsen the sequence of events,

practice their skills on low-end computers affordable for teachers, and

have an enjoyable and engaged experience all along,

via a usable website accessible 24/7.

Psychologicalchallenges are to:

enable inexperienced early career teachers in high poverty school to hone their behavior management skills,

provided game designer camera angle displays (see six (3x2) text boxes upper right screen corner) to gauge best scene angles, either using the keyboard keys or entering coordinates in the text boxes to control the camera angle directly.​​

Avatar of 6-7 year old children

We also designed and created fifteen (15) avatars of 1st / 2nd grade students, or 6-7 year old children:

of various ethnic groups such as african descent and latinos,

of different shape and sizes,

with realistic hairstyles,

with varied skin colors,

with school uniforms of blue shirts with kaki pants.

Click on an avatar to navigate our Avatar Gallery. Created by D. Brito.

Tour the classroom...

Below, you can tour the 3D classroom, empty or occupied with 1st grade students. To move around the scene, use your keyboard Arrow Keys keys “W”, “A”, “S”, and “D”. The Arrow Keys rotate the camera, whereas the “W”, “A”, “S”, and “D” enable you to accelerate in different directions:

the “W” key to move forward,

the “A” key to go left,

the “S” key to go back, and

the “D” key to go right.

You can also control the camera angle displays to gauge (and record) best scene angles, either using the Arrow Keys or entering coordinates in the text boxes to control the camera angle directly (see 3x2 text boxes upper right screen corner when navigating the classroom in UnityWebPlayer)​​.